Drug Lord: The Book

"The drug smuggling business goes on, the slaughtered dead pile up, the U.S. agencies continue to ratchet up their budgets, the prisons grow larger and all the real rules of the game are in this book, some kind of masterpiece." -- Charles Bowden

Tagged: illegal crossings

(RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH) — The Mexican migrant, slouching in his baggy jail garb, was caught crossing the border and the federal judge in San Diego wanted an explanation.

“I’ll stay in Mexico and won’t come back again,” said Carlos Arizmendi-Dominguez, 34, a former dairy farmer who was trying to return to his family in Idaho. “I ask forgiveness.”

“I’m not here to forgive,” Magistrate Judge William V. Gallo replied.

Across the Southwest border, the crackdown on illegal crossings announced in April 2017 by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is gaining traction, as immigration caseloads soar and overburdened judicial districts struggle to keep up. Detention space is reaching capacity, courthouses are scrambling to maintain security, and some judges say they have reached their limit.

On May 7, Sessions expanded the crackdown to include more first-time crossers, asylum seekers and parents who will be separated from the children to face prosecution — a move toward “zero tolerance” that will probably further overload the system.

Nowhere are the changes more noticeable than in California. In the southern federal district in San Diego, 1,275 cases were filed in the first three months of this year. Prosecutors plan to boost criminal immigration filings to about 1,000 per month, according to district data and attorneys at the Federal Defenders of San Diego, who have been notified of increasing prosecution levels by the U.S. attorney’s office.

At that pace, prosecutions could top 9,000 for the year, triple last year’s total and the most since at least since 2000, according to district data.

Prosecutions have gone up about 70 percent this fiscal year in Arizona, where the chief U.S. District Court judge said last week that the courts can’t take more cases without additional judges, attorneys, interpreters, deputy marshals and courtroom space.

“If they want to increase prosecutions to a level more than (the) 75 per day that we’re doing, we need pretty much everything,” Judge Raner Collins said.

Most migrants caught at the border are still sent back to Mexico without being prosecuted. By boosting criminal filings, the Trump administration hopes to deter illegal crossings, even as border arrests remain near historical lows.

(ABC NEWS) — U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly will wrap up a two-day tour of the nation’s border with Mexico on Friday as plans take shape to build a wall along the 2,000-mile divide between the two countries.

Kelly has told lawmakers that he would like to see wall construction well underway within two years, but he held open the possibility that it wouldn’t extend to areas where there are natural physical barriers.

Fences already cover about 700 miles of the border.

Kelly was scheduled to tour one of the most fortified stretches of the border separating San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. The two cities in the border’s largest metropolitan area are separated by a double fence, much of it topped with razor wire.

San Diego is often cited as an example of how walls can slow illegal crossings, but critics say the structures only forced people to more dangerous areas where many have died in extreme heat.

The San Diego-Tijuana area of about 5 million people has the nation’s busiest border crossing, where tens of thousands of motorists and pedestrians enter the U.S. every day. It’s also one of the busiest crossings for cargo.